Multihomed subscribers are increasingly adopting intelligent route control solutions
to optimize the cost and end-to-end performance of the traffic routed among the
different links connecting their networks to the Internet. Until recently, IRC practices
were not considered adverse, but new studies show that in a competitive environment,
they can lead to persistent traffic oscillations, causing significant performance
degradation rather than improvements. To cope with this, randomized IRC techniques
were proposed. However, the proliferation of IRC products raises concerns,
given that randomization becomes less effective as the number of interfering IRC
systems increases. In this article, we present a more scalable route control strategy
that can better support the foreseeable spread of IRC solutions. We show that by
blending randomization with adaptive filtering techniques, it is possible to drastically
reduce the interference between competing route controllers, and this can be
achieved without penalizing the end-to-end traffic performance. In addition to the
potential improvements in terms of scalability and performance, the route control
strategy outlined here has various practical advantages. For instance, it does not
require any kind of protocol or coordination between the competing IRC middleboxes,
and it can be adopted readily today because the only requirement is a software
upgrade of the available route controllers.